3 Mass Family Killings Hit Oregon in Year

Weeks before Christmas 2001, Robert Bryant sat on the floor surrounded by financial records, desperately trying to stretch a meager budget to cover his family of six.

"We have enough food for two months," his sister-in-law, Sharon Roe, later recalled him saying. "After that, we're all going to starve."

Two months later, Bryant murdered his wife and their four children and then fatally shot himself at their home in McMinnville, about 35 miles southwest of Portland.

The massacre was one of three mass family killings in Oregon in a 12-month period _ an unusual cluster of so-called "familicides" that has experts contemplating what drives men to kill their families.

"It's extraordinary," said Charles Patrick Ewing, a law professor and forensic psychologist at the University at Buffalo Law School. "It really defies all probability that you would have that many (familicides) in that short period of time."

In the past decade, there have been an average of 50 familicides a year nationwide, or about 1.4 per 100,000 households. But in Oregon that statistic rises to 2.5 slayings per 100,000 households, according to FBI data compiled by The Oregonian.

It's not uncommon for men faced with the prospect of financial ruin, marital infidelity or public humiliation to fantasize about killing their family, Ewing said. Most resist the idea, but a similar crime in the local news could make familicide seem like a more legitimate option, he said.

"I call it sort of a contagion theory. When something like this happens and becomes public knowledge, it makes it more likely that it's in their consciousness," said Ewing, who wrote the book "Fatal Families: the Dynamics of Intrafamilial Homicide."

Around the time Bryant was agonizing over his finances, Christian Longo killed his wife and three young children and dumped their bodies into shallow waters off Oregon's central coast, according to prosecutors. He has been charged with aggravated murder.

Almost exactly one year later, police accused Edward Morris of murdering his pregnant wife and three young children, whose bodies were found in Tillamook State Forest.

Experts say all three massacres have much in common with other familicides nationwide.

Most family slayings are committed by younger white men who have suffered devastating losses, said Phillip Resnick, a psychiatry professor who has testified in high-profile trials of people accused of killing their families, including Andrea Yates and Susan Smith.

Longo, Morris and Bryant all flirted with financial ruin for several years before their families' deaths.

Longo's construction cleaning business in Michigan folded under $30,000 in lawsuits in 2000. By the time Longo moved his family to Newport, Ore., he was wanted on warrants for forgery and passing bad checks.

After his arrest, Longo told investigators he was desperate to improve his family's life.

"They deserved much better," Longo said in a taped interview with investigators. "I didn't know if I could give it to them."

Bryant moved his family to Oregon from California after his landscaping business faltered and he filed for bankruptcy. And Morris couldn't hold down a job after a 1993 bankruptcy filing for his roofing business.

Men who kill their families are particularly bothered by such financial problems because they have an exaggerated belief that their family can't survive without them, experts say.

"The irony, of course, is that your family is so important that you kill them," said Ewing. "The father believes the family can't make it without him, so they're better off dead."

Longo told investigators after his arrest that his family "had the biggest bearing on anything that I ever did, every action I ever took, whether honest or dishonest."

Paul Mones, a Portland-based attorney who specializes in family violence, said friends and family members often describe men who kill their families as devoted fathers and husbands. But detectives routinely find evidence of "serious dysfunction," such as financial and marital problems or mental illness.

"In my experience," he said, "it's never, ever as it seems to be _ never."